BSP lightmap tag extraction get!

This is the first step along the way of creating an alternative lightmapping solution. What I managed to do was port my bsp extractor to work for the halo 2 tags as well which to my surprise most BSP information is also stored in the lightmap tags. Heres a shot of what my BSP extractor was able to extract from the example_example_lightmap.scenario_structure_lightm ap tag allone.

http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/775...3393121kw9.jpg


So what makes having this model so nifty? Well, mental ray has the feature called texture baking which bakes on the lighting from a render onto a set of textures based on their UVs. With this, we can fully light up the scene as if we were to render it and bake all of the lighting onto a set of textures which corresponds to the lightmap bitmap that was originally assigned to it. Mental ray is also capable of photon mapping, as well as many other nifty lighting features and the ability to render them at any texture resolution for very high res lightmaps allowing fine shadowing details generated in a small fraction of the time it would take Sapien to render a low quality preview. The only trade off is more work to do in the 3d application such as placing lights, scenery objects, sky dome image for image based lighting etc. Maya has some nifty tools that make texture baking a piece of cake (no pun intended).

So far it seems to work pretty well for extracting the base BSP model, but I am still having trouble getting the BSP instances properly generated and placed when extracting. So for right now, this will work perfectly for maps without geometry instances, but will require more work for maps with them since they have to be manually placed after extracted. This tool also works with Halo 1 bsp tags as well, but that one has some bugs as well to work out. What I plan to do when I have this instead read the scenario tag instead and place all the scenery objects accordingly and also extract the lightmap bitmaps automatically as well.

Nice work jahrain :D.

But texture baking doesnt give dynamic lights a chance to be dynamic yeah?

Gives us more control of what we want the lights to look like which rocks so gj

Dynamic lights have nothing to do with the lightmap.. right?

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Originally Posted by Snaver

Dynamic lights have nothing to do with the lightmap.. right?

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It was a trick question >_>not
I never really understood lighting in halo 1

If anyone wants to give texture baking a try for their map let me know or contact me on AIM. I have 2 current builds right now, one works for CE, the other works for Halo 2. Right now the work needed to get the baking done is pretty grueling. I hope to make it more dynamic and include some max/maya scripts to do most of the work.

howd you make a map in Maya?

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Originally Posted by Melterx12

howd you make a map in Maya?

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This isn't the thread for that kind of questions, is it? Google.

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Originally Posted by Melterx12

howd you make a map in Maya?

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What I managed to do was port my bsp extractor to work for the halo 2 tags as well which to my surprise most BSP information is also stored in the lightmap tags.

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Did you even read the topic?


Jahrain, wouldn't this cause a style problem? I remember how well this worked when everything was baked in the map, but say sticking a baked biped of yours into bloodgulch.map caused it to look out of place.

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Originally Posted by Zeph

Jahrain, wouldn't this cause a style problem? I remember how well this worked when everything was baked in the map, but say sticking a baked biped of yours into bloodgulch.map caused it to look out of place.

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Baked textures + baked lightmaps fits together perfectly. The reason it looked out of place is because of that, the missing baked lightmaps. Anyways, lightmaps are baked onto the map by sapien using photon mapping. This just takes too slow and the quality isn't worth it's time. I'm working on a mental ray baked version of blood gulch right now. I'm still tweaking with the lighting but I can tell you right now that it only takes about 10 mins to render lightmaps in mental ray for BG on about 15 bitmaps, ranging from texture sizes 2048x1024 to 128x256 compared to 128x64 to 16x8 sized bitmaps that sapien generates. The leap in quality lighting in the map will be tremendous. It would be the equivalence of running lightmaps in sapien at quality 20, which > 1 is impossible.

nice - but still not a fan of baked textures - fake

EDIT* i get it now lol